By John Kendall Hawkins
"Hell, you can't get people to vote once, let alone twice."
- Santiago Juarez, League of United Latin American Citizens
"Your chance of having your vote spoiled is 900% higher if you're Black than if you're white."
- US Civil Rights Commission
We were warned about an imminent threat on Pearl Harbor before the attack. We were certainly warned about an imminent bin Laden-led attack before 9/11. Sadly, we were clearly alerted to the likelihood of a pandemic costing millions of lives, years before Covid-19. We've been told to expect a Pearl Harbor attack on the Internet, the global communication system gifted to the world by the Department of Defense. No conspiracy, no paranoia. Just the facts, ma'am, as Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet.
But nothing's been more pearlharbored, especially since 9/11, than the electoral system that is the foundation of our once-exceptional democracy. Time after time, it's been shown that voters are being disenfranchised on a massive scale; old machines continue to break down; newer machines, incomprehensibly, remain open to easy hacking. In 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2018, our state and national elections have been rigged, according Greg Palast, in his new book, How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America's Vanished Voters. And Palast shows us the Who, What, Where and Why. Just the facts, ma'am. Then, Palast points to how, despite the disastrous disarray of his presidency, Trump will steal it again, if we let them. Basta! to that, warcries Palast.
Let's look together: We continue to be plagued by racially-motivated violence; mass shootings in a land where there's more guns (est. 400 million) than people; a homeless epidemic; dwindling healthcare, when the trend needs to be the opposite; public education that's totally lost its way as a provider of critical thinking skills for the masses and preparation for autonomous university study; middle class people sliding into food stamp territory; valued jobs on the decline in a gig economy, in which many people need two jobs to survive; mortgages, rents gone unpaid; trillion dollar student debt, enforced by master credit reports that promise ruin; and a two-party political system, now generally acknowledged to be a choice between the lesser of two evils, and has us looking in at them on the boob tube, like at the end of Animal Farm, wondering which is which. Never mind Covid-19 and climate change to follow.
These are some critical issues. And the only way they can be tackled is by electing genuinely gifted leaders with that vision thang, who can work with other such leaders, to pass the legislation required to tackle these issues. It is literally a matter of life-and-death for the Republic, and maybe even the planet. Look at the above paragraph again -- that's what people from overseas see now, where once they sought the Way Forward from our so-called, and perhaps once-upon-time legitimate, exceptional democracy. Without a functioning system in place to elect such leaders, we are doomed.
And Palast makes it clear that the 2020 presidential election is make or break, and while it's tough enough imagining Joe "Ain't Black" Biden as president, it's impossible to see anything standing with four more years of Trump. Let's not forget that from December 18, 2019 to February 5, 2020, the period when Covid-19 was just making its way around the world (21 nations infected by January 30,), but not yet in America, we were totally absorbed by the inane impeachment hearings to the point that by the end everyone just wanted to chill out watching the $500 million Super Bowl in Miami, where Covid-19 may have been as free-flowing as the beer in the rah-rah ejectility in the stands and acting as a staging point for its spread, as people returned home all over the country.
Over and over, year after year, Palast returns us to the scene of the electoral crimes. The mother of all of them was Florida 2000. Everything about the Florida election stank. Given that the state was governed by the Republican nominee's brother, who had just prior to the election publicly "guaranteed" GWB's victory, a recount should have been automatic, no Supreme Court needed. Then Secretary of State Katherine Harris "flushed 97,000 voters from registration rolls-most of them Black-tagging them as felons, ex-cons, who can't vote. In fact, the number of illegal ex-con voters? Zero," writes Palast. (Not quite true, Greg: CREEP felon Charles Colson was allowed to vote.) Add lynching chads, voter ID laws, "disqualified" votes, uncounted provisionals, and lost mail-ins. What a mess. Then toss in Nader, and Gore's inability to win Tennessee, his home state. Yuck. What did we step in?
Then we got totally disoriented by 9/11. By the time 2004 rolled around, we were deked and contused, and nobody seemed to care when Palast pointed out that John Kerry had had the presidency stolen from him. Palast writes:
...John Kerry lost the presidency by a few votes in Ohio. Kerry would have been president except that Black voters, some waiting 7 or 8 hours in the rain, found polling station doors closed in their faces at the 7:30 p.m. cut-off.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
